Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [196]
Of the state industrial plants set up by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to benefit his home district and since privatized, the textile mill has collapsed and been sold off for scrap – ‘because of corruption and bad management’. The sugar mill, I was told, operates seasonally, but it looked quite derelict when I passed it. Local people blame non-PPP governments for lack of support – but private management has also failed. In other words, yet another tale of ‘Third World’ state-led industrial development which failed to take root.
People in Larkana told me that the PPP-led government which took power in 2008 had started a few road-building projects in Larkana, but that their main help to the town and district had been to create thousands of new jobs in the local bureaucracy, police, health and education systems and distribute them to their supporters. This pleased most of the people I talked to, because ‘jobless people who were ignored by governments for the past twelve years have been given jobs. Some are from my village,’ as Ghulam Abbas, a farmer, told me.
However, when asked if the newly appointed people were qualified for these jobs he did not even to pretend that this was the case. When a new government comes to power, these useless jobs will either be abolished, or – more likely – redistributed to their own followers, leaving the area with absolutely nothing in terms of real development. For there is nothing unique to the PPP about this. G. M. Morai, who runs a Sindhi television channel in Hyderabad, told me:
Education is the only thing that can produce a bigger Sindhi middle class, but this is happening only very slowly. Sindhi education was put in the doldrums by Zia-ul-Haq, and since his time it has been the plaything of the waderos. Most of the teachers have been appointed by local wadero politicians from among their relatives and followers. Most have no training at all. Our whole education system is terribly backward. In 1999, I still did not know how to use a computer because there was nowhere in Hyderabad to learn. That has changed, but much more slowly than it should have. This also means that most of our politicians have no real education and no administrative or technocratic skills. All they can do is make speeches. The PPP has always been the biggest party in Sindh, but they reward loyalty and courage, not ability. Of course, it’s admirable to have gone to gaol for five or ten years under Zia or Musharraf but it doesn’t make you a good minister.12
Certainly Larkana, which given the PPP’s periods in government should be one of the most developed towns in interior Sindh, is not visibly different from the others: a mass of higgledy-piggledy brick and mud houses with barely paved roads and heaps of uncollected rubbish. In the centre of one busy road was a frightful sight: what appeared to be a heap of rags was in fact a squatting beggar, inviting death and alms at the same time, with cars swerving to avoid him.
EXISTENTIAL THREATS?
On the whole, most Sindhis seem not unhappy with the existing social order, and that also seems true of the middle classes, such as they are. Like my Pakistan Airlines acquaintance, if they condemn waderos in general, they are very often attached to one wadero family in particular, or to a pir family which plays the same role. Outside some of the small radical nationalist groups, demands for land reform are extremely rare.
The potentially disastrous element in all this, however, is that in two respects Sindh is not in fact static: the population is growing ever bigger, largely because of the lack of education for women; and the water is ever diminishing, largely because the people are too uneducated, apathetic, conservative, divided along tribal lines and distrustful of one another and of the authorities to improve their agriculture or build their own local water infrastructure. If this goes on, and is not reversed